Recently, it has been reported that rigid disk drives have the following disadvantages that: i) the stiffness of leads, i.e., electrical wires such as Au wires connected to a magnetic head, adversely affects the flying characteristics of a slider as magnetic head sliders are downsized; and that ii) since connecting the leads to the magnetic head or attaching the magnetic head slider to a suspension supporting it is done by hand, the improvement of productivity has been obstructed. To eliminate these disadvantages, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publications Nos. 30310/1978, 246015/1985 and 215513/1994 disclose wiring-integrated suspensions in which a wiring structure is formed integrally with a suspension (i.e., a support member for supporting a magnetic head slider at its distal end).
According to such a support mechanism in which a wiring-integrated suspension is attached directly on an arm by welding or the like, it is necessary to connect the wiring structure on the suspension surface (i.e., the magnetic disk side surface having a slider attached thereon) to a flexible print circuit (hereinafter referred to as "FPC") attached on the opposite side surface of the arm relative to the magnetic disk.
To fulfill this, Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 243449/1994 discloses a slider support mechanism in which a flexure acting as a suspension is attached on the disk side surface of the arm, wherein the wiring structure is folded upward at side edge of the flexure, a connection land is formed on the folded portion of the wiring structure to thereby connect the wiring structure on the disk side surface of the flexure to the FPC on the rear side surface of the arm. With this construction, the disclosed mechanism is to solve the following problem. That is, the FPC on the rear side surface of the arm is folded toward the disk side surface in the connecting portion between the arm and the flexure, and then the FPC is connected to the wiring structure on the disk side surface of the flexure of the suspension via the connection land. Since the connection land is a bulky solder projection, the distances cannot be reduced between the flexure, the arm and the magnetic disk.
However, as disclosed in the Publication, when the wiring structure on the disk side surface of the suspension is folded toward the rear side, it is often damaged because of the tension generated thereon. Further, even if the wiring structure is not damaged, the reliability of the wiring structure decreases with time.
According to the assembly process of such a slider support mechanism, it is necessary to fold up the wiring structure of the disk side surface of the suspension onto the opposite side surface and secure it there, whereby the process is complicated and costly. Further, because of being folded, the wiring structure is often likely to be damaged, for example, by a mold or the like used for pressing.
The wiring-integrated flexure is manufactured by laminating a polyimide insulating layer, a Cu wiring layer and a polyimide protection layer on a sheet constituting a flexure substrate and made of stainless steel (Matsumoto et al., "Development of a gimbal integrated suspension substrate for magnetic heads", 15A-13 of Proceedings of the 9th JIPC Annual Meeting). In this process, more flexure patterns are arranged in a sheet of certain area to reduce production cost most effectively.
However, according to the flexure requiring the wiring structure to be folded as described, since the folded portion projects orthogonal to a longitudinal direction of the flexure pattern, the flexure patterns cannot be formed densely in the sheet. Accordingly, the above flexure produces unwanted areas in the sheet, resulting in an increased production cost.
The object of the present invention is to solve the above problems and to enable it to easily connect the wiring structure on the disk side surface of a suspension to the FPC and the like attached on the rear side surface of the arm, thereby producing a support mechanism for magnetic head sliders at low cost.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a simple method of producing the support mechanism for magnetic head sliders.